Closed Dossier: Sacred Authority

From millet logic to modern monopoly: how a clerk became a gatekeeper of belonging.

In Israel you can ignore the Rabbinate for years — until you need it to marry, divorce, convert, or bury someone, and it reminds you it never ignored you. Rav Kook imagined a national rabbinate that would harmonize a rebuilding society. A century later it behaves like a regulatory cartel that forgot it serves the public, and the most telling fact is that a monopoly which teaches people to fly to Cyprus to get married has already lost something more important than compliance — it has lost consent. This dossier is about power, not theology — the unresolved sovereignty question the founders postponed and the country still refuses to answer.

The Chief Rabbinate is not a religious institution the state happens to fund. It is a state institution that governs in religious language.

The Israel Brief is the Mitzpe Institute's read on Israel and the region — most mornings, Sunday through Thursday. More at mitzpe.org.